Albus Severus
by gibbsheroic27
Summary: Naming his eldest son was easy. Naming his second was something else entirely. Companion piece to The Bestest Man My Dad Ever Knew. Harry's POV.


A/N: I own nothing.

They were going to call him Albus Arthur. After naming their first child after both of Harry's own primary father figures, he felt it was only fair Ginny have something of her own family reflected in this, their second son. But, a plethora of grandsons with the same middle name and the jolly presence of her still breathing father downstairs with James pretty much scuppers that idea moments after it leaves Harry's mouth. Albus is Ginny's idea, a fitting tribute to a man the entire world revered and mourned in equal measure.

Even more than half a decade later, Harry still isn't sure how he feels about the Headmaster, about Dumbledore. Everybody else still calls him simply the Headmaster, as if he claims sole ownership to the title in all of Hogwarts history, recent and ancient alike, but not Harry.

And therein lies the rub, because maybe he can understand, and maybe even forgive the ways the man used him, maybe. One day. He's pretty sure. But Harry isn't so sure if there's enough time in the universe to ever quite forgive how the Headmaster used his Potions Master. Ever quite forgive the loyalty Dumbledore received from his spy, or at the very least, the way he used that loyalty.

So, Harry is understandably slightly uncertain about Ginny's choice of name, but he concedes the point, because he named James and fair is fair. But…-James had a middle name. Which still leaves a space missing.

Harry is opening his mouth to suggest Remus when the babe in his arms shifts unexpectedly and slowly opens his eyes for the first time. Harry's breath literally catches half way up his throat, his lungs thudding painfully against his ribs, shock covering his face like a colourless mask.

"Harry?" Ginny's questioning gaze barely registers, a full minute passing before the boy who lived despite all odds to become a man he hopes made his father proud slowly raises his evergreen eyes to meet his wife's chocolate pools. Tears turn Harry's eyes into prisomed emeralds, falling freely down his face for the first time since Sirius died.

His voice lacks even the slightest tremor though, clear and determined like it hasn't been in years. "Severus. We'll call him Albus Severus."

Glancing down, Harry feels not a twinge of guilt, the rightness of the name twining into his chest in a slightly painful throb. He knows he's made the right decision.

And he knows without a doubt, gazing into the emerald green gaze of his raven haired second son, that Remus would have understood, with all his heart.

Harry may have been blind once, but he isn't anymore. He likes to think that might have made Remus smile.

He hopes it would have made him proud.

P&S

When Harry is nineteen he appears before the Wizengamot for the second time in his rather short life. It's a significantly less intimidating experience this time around, partly due to the rather lackluster makeup of the new membership-war always takes the best first and last and in between.

Mostly though, freshly graduated from the Auror training program and newly married, Harry is somehow eons older than most anyone else in that hallowed room, centenarians included.

Harry doesn't really remember much of what was said, let alone what was decided, but one thing sticks with him. Standing there in that somehow smaller room, before those really quite insignificant figures of authority and power, is the first time in his life he tries to defend Severus Tobias Snape.

It's far from the last.

P&S

Harry's patronus changes sometime after his twenty-third birthday. He's not sure why it happened then, or even when it happened precisely, peace and rather early retirement from a profession he was already too old and world weary for at twenty-one guaranteeing the possible time frame of several months to almost a year between when he last cast his patronus and when he finally notices the change.

He suspects it may have begun years earlier, when memories not his own suffused over his consciousness, an act of desperation in a Hail Mary pass to end a bloody second generation war that turned into Harry's most precious possession.

Or, it might have been when he discovers the lake in those memories, old pictures and an excruciatingly haunting visit to Privet Drive ending with Petunia's arguably only kind gesture towards her own nephew in well, ever. Harry is years past calling her decision to take him in in the first place kind.

Still, he stands there, weary beyond his twenty years, gazing out across the whispering grass, crouching to brush his hands over a gnarled oak, trunk scarred with weather and carvings alike, hundreds dotted down the centuries, picking handfuls of daisies out of the air and setting them aloft anew, and feels nothing but bitterness.

He's been petitioning the board of governors to allow Snape to be given a memorial beside Dumbledore's tomb since a week after the final battle, and he'll keep sending monthly petitions for a following twenty years, but standing on that shore line, memory so thick and yet only hearing silence, a part of Harry knows he'll never succeed. And maybe he's glad.

Or maybe he isn't. Maybe he can accept that some things don't change, that wars end and the world keeps on turning, and unimaginable loss and suffering and sacrifice and waste happens every second, and no one takes a blind bit of notice.

Harry was admittedly pretty bitter almost all the time in those early days, bitter about a lot of things, from lies to forgotten hardships to unacknowledged sacrifices. Mostly though, he's bitter about lost chances.

About the life he should have had. The life Snape should have had. About the life they both could have had.

And so, standing between the bitter reality of a past that is far happier than the present that came to pass, and a future that somehow looks no less bleak in that moment, Harry does the only thing he can, the only thing left to him, the thing he's wanted to do since he was old enough to realize normal little boys don't live in cupboards.

He screams. At the world, at his relatives, and his parents, his teachers, his godfather, the Marauders, the Headmaster, at Snape.

He's not entirely sure who he's screaming for. Nobody's there to hear him either way.

P&S

Harry still has his stag when he leaves the Aurors, nearly twenty-two and nursing a shattered knee and more fractured soul. He casts his patronus to hand in his resignation, too tired to even leave his bed, let alone go near the ministry.

He's married with a six month old, so he can't exactly become a hermit, but it's a near thing for a while.

A year later, his head screwed on pretty much well straight, if still a touch cockeyed, Harry quietly lets himself into the dust covered defense classroom, unused since Snape abandoned it six years earlier, and despite the avalanche of dust cascading around his head, he feels like he can breathe again for the first time since the end of the war.

Somewhere, he swears he can hear a faintly manic chuckling echoing mockingly off the walls to ring in his ears. The ringing never quite fades, but in grounds him somehow. Harry's actually okay with how weird that sounds. It sure beats talking snakes.

It's four and a half terms later, standing in a much cleaner version of that same room, showing a group of sixth formers old enough to have once been his classmates how to cast a patronus, when Harry finally notices the change.

He's demonstrating the concept, barely glancing at the tip of his wand as he bends carefully over the desk of a student that gives poor Neville a run for his money in clumsiness, when one of the rather more boisterous students-who both reminds him of Ron and refreshingly breaks the trend of being too in awe of the boy-who-saved-the-wizarding-world to ever speak up in class that holds most of the student body in its thrall regardless of year level-interrupts the proceedings with a characteristically enthusiastic, "Cool doe professor!"

It takes Harry a moment to process what the boy has said, so it's still filtering through when he raises his head and finds himself transfixed in the strongest sense of déjà vu he's ever experienced.

For a long instant, he's seventeen again, freezing cold and soaked to the bone, desperate and hungry and tired, transfixed and fascinated and feeling a warm glow of what can only be called love looking back, following a light in a very dark world towards salvation.

He didn't know enough to get it then, but the crystal clear clarity of hindsight nearly causes him to choke on tears as the doe before him nuzzles into his chest, tearing him from memory into reality.

Harry can never quite shake the rumor that follows what happens next that Professor Potter is just a tad mental, in the nicest possible way of course, but sitting there with his patronus cradled protectively in his arms, tears cascading down his face in rhythmic tempo with his raucous peals of laughter, Harry can't bring himself to care.

P&S

Rita Skeeter may have attempted, and admittedly partly succeeded in attaining a career comeback on the shoulders of an article that read enough like a muggle soap opera to distract even Harry from the fact that it was basically a character assassination of Severus Snape from start to finish, but amongst all its drivel, ranging widely from the almost correct to completely crazy, one point was undeniably true.

No matter how much it turns his stomach, no matter how much it feels like a betrayal greater than any other, never mind the extreme extenuating circumstances, even Harry has to admit that technically, the last Headmaster of Hogwarts abandoned his post.

A fact, however bitter to swallow and material in nature, which should have been the end of it. Snape abandoned his post, he did not have a portrait in the hallowed office of his predecessors, his name wasn't on Hogwarts records. The end.

Except, except Hogwarts had other ideas.

It's small at first, only really becoming truly unignorable when Minerva attempts to reopen the school almost two years after the Battle. September rolls around, and nobody has yet been able to even get the Gargoyle to move an inch. The staircases are silent, the portraits in chaos, the ghosts weirdly absent. The house elves refuse to answer to anyone. The castle feels, to any and all how enter, for lack of a better description, dead.

There is no explanation that anyone can find. Flitwick remembers the feeling starting, originating from the moment Snape obviously subtly disabled the Carrows and flew into the night, and looking back, maybe that should have been a clue.

But, Aberforth is eventually convinced to convince the Gargoyle to open-inexplicably, all he had to do was utter his own last name-, the house elves consent to make three, admittedly rather bland, meals a day, if they are in a good mood. McGonagall moves into Dumbledore's old office for a week before picking up her two stacks of possessions and running the school from her old office. Hogwarts reopens, students return, and if everyone wears so many extra sweaters Hogsmeade runs out of wool by October, it's of little note when some of the walls are still being replaced.

Five years and change on from the so called "final battle", Harry Potter returns to Hogwarts for the first time, travelling cloak firmly in place. Nothing much changes, to everyone's surprise but Harry, although that first feast the Hall's ceiling finally gives a quivering flicker. It only produces wisps of clouds most days, but it's an improvement on the eerie stillness of the previous years.

It is three more years before Harry finally gets up his courage to venture into the Headmaster's office, and ask Dumbledore one question. There's about a million he could ask, but this is the one that he does.

"Who is Hogwarts' Headmaster?"

The answer surprises neither of them.

P&S

Harry feels hope for the first time in nearly a decade that day. It is promptly crushed twelve hours later, when he finds finally takes Hermione's advise of twenty years ago and reads _Hogwarts, A History_. Or at least, the chapter on previous Headmasters.

1813, Headmaster Adolphus Dipplerot died while absent from his post. It took fifty years for the castle to acknowledge the breach.

That night, Harry takes home an expandable calendar and rips out the first eight pages, stuffing the rest in the bottom drawer of his desk and locking it.

Taking his quill, he begins another appeal to the Board of Governors. Hogwarts' Headmaster may be gone, but Harry will be damned if he's going to let him be forgotten.

Apparently Hogwarts agrees.

P&S

The so dubbed golden trio rarely argues, particularly in the first years after the war, shock and survivor's guilt and grief binding them together as friends, family, survivors, legacies.

Still, they do argue rather consistently about one issue. Or, one person rather.

It starts innocently enough, Harry drafting his first petition to the Wizengamot for Snape's name to be included in the official ministry memorial. It's a simple thing, inconsequential and woefully inadequate, but it's close enough to the end of the war and the anniversary of the Final Battle for Ron to object.

It's not really even an argument, not until Ron's famous short fuse burns up and he fires a rather blunt, "Why are you doing this mate?!" at Harry.

It's far from an unfair question, and there are so many ways it could be answered gently and tactfully, but something in Ron's tone reminds Harry just a little too much of his own father's voice, the only memory he has of it, seared into his mind by a memory that started out as someone else's, but has been reviewed so many times he knows it better than most of his own. So yes, he could say, it's what my mother would have wanted, or because I have to, or it's what Dumbledore would have wanted, or even, it's the right thing to do. He could have said, back off mate, and Ron probably would have listened.

And maybe he would have said all those things, maybe Harry would have even explained, except that he didn't really have an answer himself, not then, and James' voice was so loud in his head it was deafening, and it had been nearly two years and somehow it still hurt some much more than everything else combined, and Harry was not yet twenty and so very tired, and he had it on very good authority he was never noted for thinking ahead, and it just sort of slipped out.

"Because he should have been my father."

Which made no sense at all, but looking back Harry has no trouble seeing how things sort of went downhill from there.

The trouble was they never quite stopped rolling.

P&S

It's a commonly held misconception that Harry loses the ability to speak parseltongue after Voldemort murders himself inside the boy-who-lived-twice's head, but like many things built on conjecture and hearsay, it's just that, a misconception.

It would be much more accurate to say that he simply chooses not to use the ability anymore after that, because quite frankly, Nagini's brutal slaying of Snape less than two feet spatially from where Harry crouched helpless and terrified like he's rarely ever been for reasons he was still hours away from comprehending at that instant of time, was simply the last straw in an avalanche of reasons he has to be a tad afraid of snakes.

Or at least do a pretty good job of avoiding them for the foreseeable future.

Which turns out to be roughly fifteen years, until his eleven year old spies a pit viper in a menagerie window and uses the power of the green eyes Harry gave him on his father.

Harry sometimes thinks he has nothing in common with Snape, except on the days where he feels like he's living in a strange nether world of déjà vu, but his inability to resist his mother's eyes is one thing he will always share with the man.

That, and his mother's love.

P&S

"Could you do it? Could you murder the only man who had ever believed in you to save the world?" It's an unfair question, an absolute, a moral dilemma, unanswerable in the hypothetical because this has nothing to do with merit and everything to do with conviction, but he asks it because Ron is still the best strategist Harry knows alive today.

He almost expects the turnaround at this point, they've had similar arguments more than enough times over the last few years to have more than a feel for them. It hasn't destroyed their friendship, not by any means, being married to Hermione for going on a decade having gone a long way towards softening Ron's more bluntish, slightly pig-headed edges.

Still, Harry almost wouldn't bring it up, except that Albus Severus is turning eleven tomorrow and Harry hasn't quite worked out how to tell his younger son that they can't go to Headmaster Snape's grave this year, like they always do, because the night before last a group of vandals decided to completely destroy it, and the ministry doesn't care enough to sort it, and Harry simply hasn't had time.

Somehow though, for all the easy familiarity of an argument that is becoming increasingly bitter as time passes, partly because it feels more and more academic with each passing year, the thrown back "Could you?" almost floors him. Almost.

It might be easier to answer if he didn't have an answer already, if he hadn't thought about it over and over since he was seventeen years old.

As it is, the resounding "no" is one of the hardest things he's ever said. It's also one of the quickest.

P&S

He and Ginny never discuss Snape, not properly, and never alone. Ginny maintains her fire throughout their marriage, something Harry loves infinitely about her, but she's also Ron's sister as much as she is Harry's husband, and a staunch and true Gryffindor. So Harry never really raises the issue.

He ignores the whispered voice at the back of his head that sounds suspiciously familiar, "coward's way out Mr. Potter?" Because Harry was a staunch and true Lion once as well, has been since a month after his eleventh birthday.

Trouble is, as he gets older, starting if he's honest as far back as his brief acquaintanceship with Tom and the ruddy Chamber, through Dumbledore's death, Voldemort's defeat, culminating somewhere around Sev's sorting, he's not entirely sure what a true Gryffindor is anymore.

The night of Albus Severus' fifth birthday, Ginny walks into the kitchen after dinner and places a slightly ornate book, smelling of ink and freshly cut paper, on the table at Harry's elbow. He gazes at it for a long time, allowing the silvery title to blend with the green of the author's name until all he can see is a blur.

They never discuss it again, just as they never discussed how they were going to raise a boy that sometimes makes both of them question the preposterousness of reincarnation.

Somehow, after that, discussion no longer seems necessary.

P&S

Harry doesn't exactly find religion after defeating Voldemort. The wizarding world has little in the way of organized faith, and the Dursleys were hardly church goers, religion being unfashionable in that small corner of Surrey.

But, Harry finds a small church bordering the graveyard in Godric's Hollow in his nineteenth year, and even though he knows his parents probably never visited it, he goes sometimes when he needs to clear his head, sitting quietly in the first pew gazing at the flickering candles. Sometimes he lights one. Sometimes more.

One time, he lights so many he's half afraid he'll set the roof alight, but it's still not even half again enough.

The little church is the only place he ever casts a patronus in those later years, leaving him equal parts happy that the world is safe enough for such things to no longer be a life or death necessity, and bitter that the memory of the person who died to make that a reality has all but been lost to time by the outside world.

It's another anniversary, bonfires preparing to be lit by eager villagers as Harry makes his silent trek to the little graveyard. He's alone this year, only ghosts and memories accompanying him on his self-imposed pilgrimage.

He pauses briefly beside the quiet lake-so forgotten it's more a pond really-tucked quietly behind a turn in the lane leading into the Hollow, gazing across the frozen expanse at a silhouetted tree, still and cold in the moonlight. His patronus bursts seemingly spontaneously from his skin, galloping across the frozen glass with a distinct rollicking frolic in her hooves.

These days, Harry suspects this is the only place he can actually produce a patronus at all anymore. His soul seems to have a mind of its own most days now, and turning around the lane without waiting for her to disappear into the mist is surprisingly easy. Entering the still church is never easy, nor has it ever gotten any easier, time and healing aside.

He's in the process of lighting the third candle of his silent vigil when the hair on the back of his neck rises, a quiet breath ghosting past his ear. The priest is well used to his visits, and has left minutes earlier. Harry closes his eyes, déjà vu crowding into his personal space, threatening to suffocate him.

He inhales, a waft of Monkshood and sulfur so achingly familiar, even after nearly two decades, that for one amazing second, he almost lets himself wonder, lets himself hope.

A quiet chuckle meets his ears, inches away, never heard before and yet so familiar. A voice so smooth it seems to seep into his soul, so deep it bounces off the cavernous rafters far above and resounds through Harry's chest, stealing his breath completely, rasps directly beside his ear.

"Looking for something, Mr. Potter?"

No breath left for a reply, two decades and still no idea what he would say anyway, Harry screws his eyes tightly shut against the moisture threatening to spill out, and wrenches himself around in a wide arch, open flame careening dangerously in his palm, his eyes jerking open when he slams into something tangible and solid and undeniably _real_.

Green eyes meet black across a tunnel of time, ringed admittedly rather theatrically in a cascade of flames.

 _Only half of the little church's roof is actually destroyed, but the kindly old priest never lets Harry come back._

 _He's okay with that. He's already found what he was looking for._


End file.
